Batman's Origin to Be Tweaked for the New 52 in The Zero Year

Batman creative team Greg Capullo and Scott Snyder will bring Bruce Wayne back to ground zero in an upcoming, multi-part arc titled "The Zero Year," The Associated Press reports.

While elements of the backstory will be changed to accommodate the character's New 52 reimagining, the report says that "key elements," such as the death of Thomas and Martha Wayne, will remain unchanged.

"It's not 'let's redo the origin,'" Snyder told AP. "It's time for a new story showing how Batman became who he is in the New 52."

He added, "We tried to preserve as much of Batman's history as we could and keep what we could of this history intact. It's 'The Zero Year,' the one that no one has told the story of before. We see how Bruce became the Batman, built the cave, faced off with his first super villain."

That villain? Well, the AP story doesn't say, but the likeliest candidate based on previous comments by Snyder and Capullo seems to be The Riddler.

“I will use the Riddler in 2013,” the writer told fans via Twitter last year, and now that Death of the Family is over he's got a short window before this massive, eleven-part arc kicks off in June.

Snyder referred to his story as "building up the mythology," and said, "We're not going to take apart Year One."

The writer also likely knows the kind of controversial territory that making any changes to the origin story will throw him into, having told fans at Emerald City Comic Con, “This really is a really ambitious, crazy story that will be announced in about two weeks…I really believe it’s our boldest story."